FreeBSD Project "ideas" List

Over the years, the FreeBSD Project has built up a list of ideas for implementation work that seems like it might be a good idea, but no hands are available to do it. If you would like to contribute to the FreeBSD Project, you might peruse this list to get a sense of the kinds of work available to do. Obviously, contributions are not limited to this list!

Please do contact us before starting on it though -- sometimes items remain on the list after they are completed, and sometimes they are just ideas, rather than a recipe for success. Searching our mailing list archives may turn up the discussions leading to ideas being put on the list. Frequently the initial goal would be to simply investigate the idea, rather than produce code. Many project ideas list contacts, who it is worth sending an e-mail. Otherwise (and perhaps as well), send e-mail to our hackers@ mailing list.

This page can also be used for inspiration of your own Google Summer Of Code idea. Please note: sideas on this list are generally considered unsuitable for Summer of Code for many possible reasons (too large, too small, no available mentor, etc) but there may still be ideas here that could form the basis of a good GSoC task.

Wireless Projects

Embedded Projects

Reduced FreeBSD kernel size for embedded

Description

The FreeBSD kernel has been optimized over the years for a server or workstation environment. Memory is plentiful in these environments, so little attention was given to the size of the kernel. There's a number items in the kernel that can be made optional without reducing affecting the functionality needed in an embedded environment. These include things like not compiling in strings into the kernel, less agressively inlining code, making some non-optional features optional and investigating compile time flags. This task requires identifying potentially optional kernel content and building the infrastructure to make that content optional.

Requirements

Strong C language programming skills.

Understanding of system calls and general kernel architecture.

Make creating a bus easier

Description

There's about a dozen busses in the tree now that manage resources and activate children. They are far too hard to create. We need to abstract out the basics for these buses and provide a way to allow these buses to be a subclass of this new base class.

Requirements

Variable hints

Description

Often times in the embedded world, you know what kind of built-in devices are on a SoC (System on a Chip) only because you know the specific model of that SoC. It is desirable to have a mechanism that code on these machines can use to load one of several sets of hints, which can then be used to populate the bus.

Requirements

* Good C programming skills

ARM cleanup

Description

Adding a new board to the arm code is a lot harder than it needs to be. A lot of benefit could be had by creating tables for memory ranges, etc, and having more generic initialization code. Much of this can also be Machine Independent (MI).

Requirements

Good C programming skills

Good refactoring skills

File System Projects

Improve the performance of dump/restore

Description

A performance evaluation of the split cache (as is) and an unified cache (like e.g. NetBSD) would be interesting. More details in this mail to the hackers mailing list. Additional improvements are welcome too.

Requirements

Knowledge of C programming.

Basic understanding of backup/restore procedures.

Filesystem decompression layer

Solaris 10 and newer provide dcfs; a read-only decompression stacking filesystem layer for UFS. Files are initially compressed by a userland fiocompress utility. The filesystem layer is very simple, it is implemented in single file that permits transparent decompression without the end user knowing if the file is compressed or not. While the implementation is really simple it is very useful by making possible to install in systems with little memory or for quick compression of files in typical read-only directories like /usr/bin. While the Solaris fiocompress implementation uses zlib, it would be easy to use more modern algorithms like lz4 or snappy.

EXT2FS improvements

Description

FreeBSD's EXT2FS implementation includes basic ext2/3/4 support and has received many improvements and extensive cleanups in the last years; mostly in the lines of updating the code to match better what our native UFS1 implementation does. While the main support is basically done, we could consider taking new steps: adding write support for extents and exploring new features (compression, encryption) to make it a full-fledged alternative native filesystem.

Requirements

Ability to read and understand foreign C code, familiarity with UFS is a plus.

Ability to interpret results from testsuites and find solutions.

Knowledge of UFS/EXT2FS filesystem internals.

Porting HFS+

Description

The Hierarchical File System was developed by Apple Inc. for use in MacOS. With the Release of MacOS X it received many new features, and the source code was made available as part of XNU. An initial FreeBSD 5.3 HFS port was made and although it was subsequently abandoned and support for locking has to be added, it would be excellent reference material for an updated port. A port would also be a good reference for bringing other interesting filesystems from Apple's Darwin.

Requirements

Strong knowledge of C.

Understanding of FreeBSD's filesystem interfacing and VFS.

Port DragonflyBSD's HAMMER file system to FreeBSD

Description

The HAMMERfilesystem is a new file system created as a response to new ideas in file systems initiated by the likes of ZFS and BTRFS. It introduces innovative features and is considered production-ready in DragonflyBSD. Because of the shared ancestry between FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD some parts of Hammer may be easier to port; however, the task is not for the faint of heart.

Requirements

Strong knowledge of C.

Understanding of file systems and VFS kernel interfaces

Understanding of kernel debugging.

Note

The project is considered too complex for a GSoC see: PortingHAMMERFS. HAMMER2 may be more portable.

Kernel Projects

Test Kload (kexec for FreeBSD)

Technical Contact: (We'll have to find another mentor for this project too)

Description

It's like Linux kexec feature lets you restart the OS very quickly without going via BIOS initialization. You pass the ELF file of the kernel and the current kernel gets overwritten and the new kernel starts. Idea is to actually test it well.

Requirements

Strong knowledge of C.

Strong knowledge of computer architecture

Experience with kernel programming.

Document all sysctls

Description

The sysctl(8) utility retrieves kernel states and allows processes with appropriate privilege to change kernel states. On request it is able to display description lines which document the kernel state. Unfortunately not every sysctl is documented. This task is possible to share with other volunteers. mat has done some development in Perforce, in the mat_sysctl_cleanup branch.

Find every undocumented sysctl in the kernel.

Try to determine what this sysctl is for and document it.

Requirements

Ability to read and understand foreign C code.

Document the sound subsystem

Description

Add an example driver in share/examples which allows to write a new driver. For this purpose the example driver should contain enough documentation as comments and/or pointers to documentation in man-section 9. This work can be based upon http://people.freebsd.org/~cg/template.c.

Rewrite the sound subsystem chapter in the FreeBSD Architecture Handbook. The rewrite should contain an overview of the available parts in the sound subsystem and how they interact (data flow, dependencies, ...) and fit together. Additionally it should contain links to already available documentation (official standards, section 9 manual pages, ...).

The page soundsystem which documents everything related to the sound subsystem in FreeBSD has been created.

Requirements

Ability to read and understand foreign C code.

Documentation writing skills.

DTrace

DTrace is a dynamic tracing facility designed by Sun Microsystems and released in Solaris 10. They have since released the major part of Solaris under the banner of OpenSolaris and the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) 1.0.

We need a clean CTF implementation for FreeBSD to avoid the license (CDDL) that Sun has on their code. A specification about the file format needs to be written, and someone who never looked at the Sun code (and doesn't while doing the work) would have to implement that and write tests for the implementation.

DWARF2 call frame information (GSoC)

Description

A debug kernel is not able to show stack traces with cross exceptions anymore. This is because we do not emit any dwarf2 call frame information for any assembler code, since gdb switched to the dwarf2 format. A volunteer should annotate every assembler file [*.[sS]] with dwarf2 call frame information.

Requirements

Knowledge of assembly code.

Knowledge of ".cfi_*" pseudo-ops to insert dwarf2 frame descriptors.

Implementing PCI-Hotplug and ExpressCard support

Description

Hotplug PCI, and ExpressCard (Hotplug PCI + powersave) support is sadly missing from FreeBSD. This would require implementing some missing code to notice cards being inserted and removed, along with some code to allocate resources. There is also likely some work to be done with PCIe PHY power saving.

Remove procfs dependencies

Someone needs to finish the support for PT_SYSCALL in the ptrace() subsystem and remove the need for procfs in gcore.

Requirements

C knowledge.

Understanding of kernel debugging interfaces.

Suspend to disk

Implement a suspend/resume from disk mechanism. Possibly use the dump functions to dump pages to disk, then use ACPI to put the system in S4 or power-off. Resume would require changes to the loader to load the memory image directly and then begin executing again.

Requirements

Good knowledge of C.

Understanding of the hardware/software interface.

A laptop that works with ACPI.

Kernel awareness.

ZFS Boot Environment menu for GPT/EFI boot

Currently the ZFS boot environment (sysutils/beadm) uses GRUB to provide boot menu. It would be great if the menu functionality can be implemented in the boot code (gptzfsboot), basically by traversing a list of available bootable ZFS datasets, show a menu for it, and tell the next stage of boot loader to load system from that datset.

Requirements

Ability to read and understand foreign C code.

Ability to write C code.

Knowledge of i386 assembly.

Knowledge of BIOS interfaces.

Knowledge of low-level boot behavior.

Sync FreeBSD i386 boot code with DragonFly

DragonFly invested a lot of time to clean up and document it. Additionally they fixed some bugs. Interesting files in the DragonFly CVS are sys/boot/i386/bootasm.h, sys/boot/i386/bootasmdef.c, sys/boot/boot0/*, sys/boot/boot2/*, sys/boot/i386/btx/*, sys/boot/i386/cdboot/*, sys/boot/i386/libi386/amd64_tramp.S, sys/boot/i386/libi386/biosdisk.c and sys/boot/i386/loader/main.c. An interested volunteer has to compare and evaluate both implementations and port interesting/good parts.

Requirements

Ability to read and understand foreign C code.

Ability to write C code.

Knowledge of i386 assembly.

Knowledge of BIOS interfaces.

Knowledge of low-level boot behavior.

Memory Compression

MacOS X "Mavericks" does memory compression using the WKdm algorithm when it is low on resources. Brought this up in IRC, theraven said it is something he has had on his mind and he would be willing to mentor someone who wanted to work on this. Leaving this here so the idea isn't lost. -feld

Solaris Doors IPC Implementation

Doors provide a mechanism for processes to issue remote procedure calls to functions in other processes running on the same system. The door APIs were developed by Sun Microsystems as a core part of the Spring operating system and were officially available in Solaris 2.6. They are extensively used in Illumos.

In addition to the Solaris/Illumos port, which is well documented, there is also an outdated implementation for linux that can serve for comparison. The project would consist in understanding how the existing code works and designing a completely new, but compatible, implementation for FreeBSD.

Requirements

- Interest in Inter-process Communications

- Ability to understand code and the existing implementations in Illumos and linux.

- Capacity to run your own tests and benchmarks.

Virtualization Projects

Solaris/Illumos jails

FreeBSD has the capacity to create system jail(8)s for environments that can be run natively with ABI extensions. This has been used successfully to provide GNU Linux and Debian kFreeBSD jails. FreeBSD i386 also has the capacity to run some SVR4 binaries but that support was never ported for amd64 or even tested with Solaris binaries. While of little practical use, it would be interesting to build on the previous developments and finish the SVR4 ABI support so that Solaris/Illumos distributions can run in a jail.

Requirements

Willingness to dig into OS internals

Knowledge of i486/amd64 assembler

bhyve gdb-stub/dcons integration

FreeBSD's 'bhyve' Hypervisor has a feature where it allows the kernel debugger to communicate with the outside world via a socket. Unfortunately it is quite slow, being polled one byte at a time. In addition it still uses the kernel on the VM to do all the work. Some avenues of improvement could include using the existing dcons memory buffer driver so that a whole buffer might be transferred at a time, or to make the current driver much faster. One might also intercept some of the commands (memory read for example) and perform them directly in the hypervisor so that cooperation of the virtualized system is not required to examine memory. It is even possible that by manipulating the processor flags appropriately, one could single step or 'break' the guest without its cooperation at all.

Requirements

Willingness to dig into OS internals

Knowledge of i486/amd64 assembler and virtualization concepts

ability to decode intel/AMD processor specs

VirtualBox shared folder support for FreeBSD guests

Description

Oracle VirtualBox does unofficially support FreeBSD as host and guest operating system. VirtualBox shared folder support allows to access folders of your host from within the guest system. This is similar how you would use network shares in Windows networks except that shared folders do not need require networking, only the VirtualBox Guest Additions.

This task was part of GSoC 2013 where the main focus was on porting the code to FreeBSD. The result was almost working read only support but more bugs need to be fixed and read write support needs to be added and tested.

Networking Projects

SCPS, Space Communication Protocol Standards

SCPS is a protocol suite designed to allow communication over challenging environments. Originally developed jointly by NASA and DoD's USSPACECOM, these protocols are used for commercial, educational, and military environments. A student project in this area would involve implementing various network protocols according to specification (SCPS File Protocol, similar to FTP; SCPS-Transport Protocol, based on TCP; and others.)

Note that European Space Agency has now an ESA Summer of Code in Space program and while FreeBSD is not a mentoring organization, interested students could motivate such a process.

Requirements

Good knowledge of C and TCP.

Able to understand the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack.

A testbed with at least two machines.

Porting Projects

Port FreeBSD to new platforms

Porting to new platforms is a good way to learn the internals of FreeBSD and serves to check the general portability of the base system. While there are important efforts to maintain an external toolchain working it would be ideal to start working on newer platforms that are already supported by the toolchain in base and where the hardware support is either easy to find or available through emulation.

Requirements

Good Knowledge of C and assembler of the target platform.

Familiarity with (cross)building FreeBSD.

Port Firefox OS to work with FreeBSD

Firefox OS is a new mobile operating system developed by Mozilla, based on Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. They actually use a variant of the Android/linux kernel called Gonk and each platform provider is left with the requirement to address the licensing issues related to their changes. It should be possible to provide an alternative kernel based on FreeBSD.

Requirements

Experience porting low-level linux applications to FreeBSD

Familiarity with HAL.

Most of the work would probably have to be done/merged upstream.

Port mdb (from Illumos/SmartOS) to FreeBSD

mdb is a kernel debugger that has a scripting language. It includes scripts to make debugging ZFS and working with DTrace easier, so it would be helpful.

Requirements

Good C knowledge

Some kernel experience

Security Projects

Update base OpenSSL to 1.0.2

OpenSSL has just released the 1.0.2 branch which is at minimum a big re-format of the code.Next to that, the project has released a new release schedule which indicates that the version currently used on FreeBSD (1.0.1) will be end-of-life by end of 2016.

Requirement

Porting skills

Security

Crypto

libc support for FORTIFY_SOURCE

On GNU libc the FORTIFY_SOURCE macro "provides lightweight support for detecting buffer overflows in various functions that perform operations on memory and strings". Our libc currently doesn't support it: google's Bionic libc implemented this under a BSD License so it is a mandatory reference.

Requirement

Good C knowledge

Security Mindset

Testing and Continuous Integration projects

Travis Continuous Integration Support for FreeBSD

Description

Travis Continuous Integration is a very popular Continuous Integration system used by projects hosted on GitHub. If a GitHub project has a .travis.yml config file in the root directory, the Travis system will build and test the project if new code is committed to the GitHub project.

Currently, Travis only supports Linux and MacOS X. The Travis project closed issue 1818 which was a request to add FreeBSD support to Travis, due to lack of resources. However, having this support would be very useful, and allow FreeBSD to test many third party projects on GitHub.

Userland / Installation Tools Projects

BSD-licensed ELF Tools

Create BSD-licensed versions of ELF processing tools (e.g., ld, dbx, as and others) using the ELF(3) and GELF(3) API set. Identify overlapping functions in those tools and create a library out of the common functions. Identify parts which can be generated by tools (e.g., machine code parser generators) to support our Tier-1 and Tier-2 architectures.

Requirements

BSD-licensed Text-Processing Tools

grep: It has been committed to the base system and available as an alternative of GNU grep. The compatibility is good but the performance is quite behind GNU grep, which prevents us from using it as a default. There are also some problems of regular expressions involved. It is under active development by gabor@.

diff/diff3/sdiff: Many command-line options are supported but some features are still missing. Maybe the three programs can be integrated into a single binary, this should be evaluated. A thorough performance benchmark should also be done. See SummerOfCode2012/JesseHagewood for last status.

mdocml: Some groff features are very hard to implement but they aren't strictly needed to render our man pages. Yet some manuals do not compile with mdocml. Investigate the reasons and create a migration plan.

Requirements

Knowledge of C.

boot.kernel.org Compatible Installation Image

boot.kernel.org is a project to provide boot images that can be booted over http with a small boot program (gpxe). A number of Linux distributions have installation media available. It would be useful if FreeBSD's release process could generate appropriate boot images.

lint(1) improvements from OpenBSD

Requirements

NDMP data server

The NDMP initiative was launched to create an open standard protocol for network-based backup for network-attached storage. Major commercial storage systems come with a compliant service. This allows major commercial backup systems to backup such NAS devices. Including a NDMP disk server into FreeBSD would allow to play nice out of the box (modulo some configuring) regarding backups in a corporate environment.

Requirements

Access to a commercial backup system with NDMP support (mostly for interoperability testing; since a NDMPcopy application seems to be available, this is not a hard requirement).

Good knowledge of a programming language which is included in the base system.

Knowledge about UFS snapshots.

Port prebind from OpenBSD

The OpenBSD prebind is a secure implementation of prelinking that is compatible with address space randomization. Prelinking allows to speed up application startup when a lot of libraries are involved. This should show a noticeable effect with e.g. GNOME/KDE.

Requirements

Good C knowledge (reading and writing).

Proxy auto-config file support for libfetch

A proxy auto-config (PAC) file contains a JavaScript function "FindProxyForURL(url, host)" that determines which HTTP or SOCKS proxy, if any, to use to access a given URL. In most application the file may be specified manually or discovered using the Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol. Support for PAC files in libfetch would make fetch more versitle.

Supporting PAC files nominally requires a fairly complete JavaScript implementation. Google's V8 JavaScript engine is BSD Licensed, however it compiles code to native machine code so platform support is an issue. However, the parser etc may provide a good starting point, and other engines may also exist and should be evaluated. A minimalist implementation of the language with commonly used constructs such as if/else, string comparison, and functions would be sufficient in many cases.

Requirements

Strong knowledge of secure C programming.

PXE Installer

It would be great to have a bundled PXE installer. This would allow one to boot an install server from a FreeSBIE live CD-ROM on one box, set the BIOS on subsequent boxes to PXE boot, and then have the rest happen by magic. This would be very helpful for installing cluster nodes, etc.

m@ is working on a bundled PXE installer as part of his BSDInstaller project within the Google Summer of Code 2006. The PXE Installer is working but some non-PXE related issues have to be solved before it can enter the tree.

Requirements

Good PXE knowledge.

Improve cron(8) and atrun(8)

Currently, cron(8) and atrun(8) are outdated in their implementation. Here are some directions for improvement:

Update cron(8) to ISC cron with security fixes from OpenBSD.

Integrate the atrun(8) functionality into cron(8), as it was done in NetBSD.

Requirements

Strong knowledge of the C language and Unix API.

libpw

Technical Contact:

Create a library to be able to manage users/groups easily, it also should have a pam/nss-like plugin framework for different account system.

Requirements

better restore support for sparse files

Currently, restore does not handle spare files very well. It will seek to the next fragment before trying again. If you have a sparse file that is 72TB and contains nothing, the dump will appear to hang as it will do 72 billion lseek calls. Clearly this is not very efficient. The fix is to update tape.c so that in getfile, instead of calling skip for every block, that it scans the spcl array for the next non-sparse block, and do a single large seek.

Requirements

Add support for usbdump file-format to wireshark and vusb-analyzer

Currently it is not possible to graphically see USB traffic. By adding a backend to the above mentioned software packages this can easily be made possible.

The project consists of writing a small amount of C (wireshark) and Python (vusb-analyzer) code.

This is expected to be a 1 month exercise.

Requirements

Good knowledge of C

Good knowledge of Python

Basic knowledge about USB

Support for setting base system build options via dialog(1)

Our ports support setting build options via dialog(1) for ages. Recently, with the pkgng invention, it was made possible also to pack port's build options into binary package - later, a functionality to track dependencies based on the build options may be added.

Our base system build infrastructure now prefers consistent /etc/src.conf options in favor to older ad-hoc /etc/make.conf options. Currently, there are only binary ones, thus possible to map to dialog(1) checkboxes. The idea is to be able to do cd /usr/src && make config to see familiar dialog(1) interface - just as in any port in /usr/ports (it should be complemented with usual make showconfig and make rmconfig, of course).

This idea, amongst direct simplification of average user's life, is valuable in regard to possible future packaging of the FreeBSD base system to one or a few pkgng packages. Such packaging is desired in some environments of large production server farms for easier managing/upgrading servers, see https://github.com/z0nt/pkg for such a project. In the future, however, this could be useful for tracking pkgng packages dependencies based on world's build options (e.g. a port requires a world built with WITH_IDEA or not built WITHOUT_PF, etc.).

Requirements

Good knowledge of make and shell code

Knowledge of the FreeBSD build and installation infrastructure

RAID and disk monitoring suite

Technical Contact:

There have been several organizations that have independently developed RAID and disk failure monitoring tools. These should be gathered together into a unified group of daemons and monitoring scripts to provide a consistent view of disk status.

Requirements

Knowledge of /etc/rc.d scripts and ordering

Basic understanding of C and UNIX

Shell scripting in /bin/sh

Cross-building FreeBSD from Linux and/or Mac OSX

Technical Contact: brooks@

FreeBSD's build system is self-contained, but only really designed to be run on FreeBSD as it makes assumptions about the host platform and available tools. Being able to build a fully-functional FreeBSD userland and kernel from either Linux or Mac OSX without having to use FreeBSD inside a virtual machine would allow more people to make use of and build products out of FreeBSD easier.

The NetBSD approach of bootstrapping via build.sh is one way to go. Another is to make autoconf versions of the key build tools and ideally add them to debian/macports/homebrew/etc so users can install the set of things they need and build from there. The bmake program is typically already available (perhaps in a somewhat old form so it may be viable to use in the bootstrap process).

On Mac OSX an additional complication exists in that the default filesystem is case-insensitive. At least to begin with, creating a case-sensitive filesystem to do this work on is recommended. Some work has already been done here, and it may be desirable to build upon that.

Requirements

Knowledge of build infrastructure, Makefiles, etc

Knowledge of compilers and linkers

Access to a Linux or Mac OSX machine (for OSX, use a case-sensitive filesystem)

Project phases

Initial phase

Identify/list possible resources in FreeBSD. See the performance checklist postings above for ideas. Those are just a start, this can iteratively be extended to include subitems (e.g. in a first iteration the "network stack" could be an item of a resource, in a second iteration each network interface is a resource, on a third iteration one network protocol could be a resource, on a fourth iteration just the TX queue of a NIC can be a resource, ...). Not everything needs to be identified initially, at one point the work on this resource list should be pushed back to a point where all or some of the following items are handled for the existing resources. When all OS resources are listed, further iterations could even include 3rd party applications (e.g. apache httpd requests, mysql table scans, ...). Interesting values for each resource can be bandwidth (total/percentage), operations per second, latency, usage duration, time until completion, ... Ideally the result is written down in the FreeBSD wiki. For each "high-level" resource (e.g. network stack) try to document some kind of "where to look next if saturated/on-error/..." resource (e.g. network interface, protocol checks, ...)

For each resource identify/document "utilization", "saturation" and "error" values (see the USE method in the prerequisites), and code points in the source which show them. If there's no code point in the source, mark the resource for later investigation. Hardware provided info, e.g. CPU counters, count as as "code points" in this sense too.

For each resource determine/document existing tools which provide the required information (saturation/error) and how to use them to get the required info.

For each resource without an existing way to get the required information, but with a code point in the source which provides the required information, write a dtrace/hwpmc/whatever script/program/whatever to query the required information.

For each resource without a code point in the source which provides the required information, find a "cheap" way to determine the resource value and add corresponding code readable by sysctl or dtrace (readout variable on existing probe or a specific SDT probe just for this) or whatever (and write a script/program/whatever as above).

Improvement phase

For each existing code point with an existing script check if a new way of handling this info (sysctl, dtrace probe, ...) would make the sampling of this data cheaper (= less performance impact of the performance monitoring itself).

Visualization phase

Write a tool (for the ports collection) which visualizes data (heat maps, flame graphs, ...) gathered from the above performance data collection scripts (either stored somewhere or by calling the scripts directly) and provides hints where to look next in case a resource is the bottleneck. The blog of Brendan Gregg gives a lot of ideas how to visualize with various types of graphs. Suggestion: make it system independent, foresee use on *BSD, Solaris and Linux.

Cloud phase (everything is cloudy nowadays...)

Write an agent which is able to collect the data which the visualizing tool is able to handle and extend the visualizing tool to collect data from agents on other machines (via an encryted and authenticated connection if needed = possible but not mandatory, depending on the environment).

Datawarehouse phase (buzzword bingo!)

Write a gateway/collector service which a) is able to "handle" agents in a datacenter (query and store data), b) is able to handle bulk-data-retrieval requests from remote locations (transfer data from remote datacenters to the company headquater), and c) is able to store/archive queried data for later use ("How did this look last week/month/year?").

Discussion

The first item in the initial phase is a big item. It may be better to see the complete initial phase as an iterative or divide and conquer step. First determine some high level resources and process all steps of the initial phase on them. Then repeat the initial phase again by braking up the high level resources in more detailed items (e.g. first "all CPU in system" as one resource, second "each CPU in system" as a resrouce, third breaking up each CPU via hardware performance counters).

GSoC info

Each phase is a big project of its own. Do not expect to be able to do it during some weekends or during a GSoC. If you think you can, you did not get the full scope, think again. If you still insinst after rethinking, be our guest, but you better prepare a very good outline what you want to do when, how, at which level of detail (e.g. come with a list of resources for the first item in the initial phase), and also include what you will NOT do/cover/handle but could be related (e.g. CPU internal performance counters if you want to handle the CPU performance side of this). You already need to know FreeBSD (you use it already on your server or desktop since several months) and you shall not be afraid to ask questions or discuss on the mailinglists. This is not a project for 2h per day, if you are not motivated to spend time on this, you better chose a different topic.

This can be made "big enough" to be a project suitable for finals at your university (depending on the requirements of your university, with or without extending it over the end of the GSoC).

Other Projects

If you are interested in working on a project not explicitly mentioned above, you may want to contact one of the potential Technical Contacts below: